Talia Chetrit has gained a reputation as a rigorously conceptual, feminist photographer, with a radically autobiographical approach. From her position behind the lens, Chetrit has brought us deep into her intimate life by expanding self-portraiture beyond her own body, involving family members in both cooperative and invasive scenarios.
The latest collection of work by Talia Chetrit riffs insouciantly on themes of life, death, and birth through a variety of visual languages. In JOKE, Chetrit brings together family photos, street photography, still lifes, selections from the artist’s teenage archive, and expansive self-portraits involving a cast of characters who feature as both engaged and unwitting collaborators.
Referencing a wide range of photographic tropes and traditions, Chetrit studies the power dynamics between photographer and subject as they spar and collude. JOKE deals in high humour and deadly seriousness, plunging us into a world in which social roles are inverted, norms are examined, judgements of taste and value are suspended, and everything coalesces, dead and alive, true and false, sincere and affected.